I've been on antidepressants for a decade — here's what everyone gets wrong about them

I was in the eighth grade, sitting at my assigned seat with
a pencil and a green sheet of paper in front of me — it was the
class final. Suddenly, my mind went blank. The words and numbers
on the page all blurred together and became meaningless. I
froze with fear. My heart raced. What was happening to
me? With all the effort I could muster, I raised a
shaky hand to ask for the bathroom pass. As soon as I got there,
I started crying uncontrollably. Somewhere between the sobs, I
managed to vomit into the toilet.

Although I didn't know it then, what happened that day would
be the beginning of a painful and confusing series of severe
bouts — "episodes," in psychiatric parlance — of anxiety and
depression that would land me in a handful of hospitals and
treatment centers. Eventually, I'd get prescribed
antidepressants, the drugs that I'm now convinced saved my
life. But the road to medication was rocky. If it weren't for a
series of somewhat random events, a handful of truly caring
doctors — and, of course, the health insurance that made the
drugs affordable — I probably would never have found
them.

The odds of me finding these medications were largely against me,
as they are for many people who may need them. There's a wide
public perception, which I've encountered directly and which
Peter D. Kramer, a psychiatrist and Brown University
professor, details in his new book, "Ordinarily
Well: The Case for Antidepressants," that
antidepressants are inherently bad. They're seen either as
an easy way out of the "hard work" of dealing with feelings, or
as something that can get you high. Some even think they can
be manipulated to make you smarter or give you superpowers.
This certainly isn't what happened to me. (If it did,
I'd be flying around South America in a cape instead of writing
this post.)

For me, what antidepressants did was remarkably simple: They made
me feel OK. In the words of Kramer, they made me feel
"ordinarily well."

Panic

When my anxiety first started cropping up, my parents wanted me
to go a "natural" route — in order words, they wanted me to
stick to talk therapy with counselors. They wanted me to
avoid medication.

Me (right corner) in high
school.Courtesy of Trisha
Ashford

At the time, their choice made sense. Everything from
antidepressants to ADHD medications were being prescribed at
alarming rates. In 2013, one
in 10 Americans took an antidepressant. And many of them
likely didn't need it. A study published
that year in the journal Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics
found that roughly two-thirds of a sample of
about 5,000 people diagnosed as depressed in the
previous year didn't meet the criteria for a major
depressive episode, as defined in the
psychiatry handbook known as the Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). It seemed as though
the vast majority of doctors were merely writing a prescription
and raking in money, rather than sitting with patients and taking
time to talk out their issues using evidence-based methods
like
cognitive behavioral therapy,

But eventually, despite weekly sessions of therapy, my panic
attacks got so bad that I couldn't sleep or go to school. I had
nightmares. I thought of every single worst-case scenario that
could happen and I lived as if it were imminent. I started
obsessing about everything, from the tests I might fail, to the
friends who might abandon me, to the food that might make me
fat. I contemplated suicide. My weight dropped to 90
pounds. Concerned, my parents took me to dozens of doctors, who
tested me for everything. When no results turned up, my mom
took me to see a psychiatrist. The drive was four hours
round-trip, but somehow one of my working parents managed to
squeeze it into their schedule every few weeks. After two or
three 45-minute sessions with the psychiatrist, I
was diagnosed as anorexic "with panic" and given a
prescription for a tiny orange tablet called Klonopin.

Klonopin is not an antidepressant. It's a tranquilizer. It's
typically used to treat seizures, but it's prescribed for panic
disorder as well. I was supposed to take it whenever I felt
panicky, which sounded like a bit of a slippery slope to me.
Didn't I always feel a little bit panicky? How would I know
when I really needed it and when I was just trying to avoid my
feelings? So I reserved it only for when I was in the throes
of a full-blown attack. It "worked," if you'd call feeling like
your mind has been wiped blank working. Klonopin made me
numb.

Me (middle) as a high
school senior.Courtesy of Trisha
Ashford

Starting over

One day, I refused to go to my appointment. I cried and told my
Mom that there was no point in trying anymore, that I was broken
and there was nothing that could be done for me. For some reason,
she didn't believe me.

So we started over. I stopped seeing the psychiatrist who
gave me Klonopin and began seeing other doctors. I saw an
endocrinologist, who specialized in hormones, along with several
different therapists. After weeks of consultation
with all of them, the endocrinologist decided to put me on
my first antidepressant — a
drug called Lexapro. Lexapro belongs to a
group of antidepressants called selective serotonin reuptake
inhibitors, or SSRIs, which are thought to work by
amplifying the activity of the chemical serotonin in
the brain.

The way we'd know whether or not the medication was working,
my doctor told me, was if I didn't really notice any big
changes in my feelings or my behavior.

That sounded strange to me. Didn't I need a
big change? After all, I'd wanted to die. Still, I was ready
to try just about anything, and I trusted her. So, I took the
medication as directed, and continued to see her and
my therapist.

At some point (I can't say exactly when), I started to feel like
the world seemed a little less dark. It was as if I'd been seeing
everything in front of me with a dark-tinged, heavily-vignetted
filter for years, and someone had gently peeled it off. I didn't
feel like I wanted to die, and I didn't feel numb. Everything was
sort of OK, and when my doctor asked how I was doing, that's all
I could tell her. "I feel OK," I said. She smiled.

Studies suggest that this can happen for many people with
depression and anxiety who are prescribed the right medication
and corresponding treatment, as Kramer details. In one chapter,
Kramer writes about one of his first patients, a
woman named Adele, who he saw while he was still a medical
student at Harvard. She was a 26-year-old elementary school
teacher who suffered from depression and who'd considered
suicide. After Adele had been treated for an overactive
thyroid, Kramer's supervising doctor placed her on the
antidepressant drug Imipramine. "Imipramine acted in
a fashion I later came to call courteous," writes Kramer.
"It afforded modest but invaluable relief."

That modest, but invaluable, relief was exactly what I'd
experienced on Lexapro.

After the panic attacks had stopped and I gained back some
weight, my therapist started suggesting I get back into some
types of gentle exercise, like yoga. Slowly but surely, I
started to get better.

Business Insider/Erin Brodwin

I made friends. I started eating real food. I
excelled in school. I moved to a different city. I went to
college. I developed a support network of people I could trust
and talk to about anything. I moved across the country. I went to
graduate school. I started a career.

I did absolutely none of it on my own.

I kept working with a therapist who was trained
in cognitive
behavioral therapy, a type of psychotherapy that
involves recognizing negative thought patterns and
coming up with solutions to overcome them. I saw a psychiatrist
who managed my medication, went to group yoga classes at
least a few times a week, and stayed close to the friends
and family that had helped me through the bad times.

At some point though, despite all of it, I hit a bit of a lull.
Some of my problematic behaviors started to creep back in. My
psychiatrist recommended trying a new medication. I was hesitant,
but again, I trusted her. She wrote me a prescription for Prozac,
and I stopped the Lexapro. The transition was a little rocky, but
eventually I felt OK again. I continued doing yoga several times
a week, connecting with my friends and family, and going to
therapy.

For me, antidepressants were a tool. They enabled me to start
feeling OK, to start reaching out to others for help, and to
start doing things that I enjoyed doing and that made me feel
good. They lifted a heavy blanket of depression that had
previously made all of these things sound like impossible chores.
I don't think they're a panacea, and they're certainly not for
everyone. But they worked for me. They helped me find
normal. And without them, I don't think I'd ever know what
that feels like.